Findings

Weird Science: For more than a decade, science educators have
believed that students learn better if they actually do science
in the classroom rather than just read about it in books. But according
to a new study, even the best of these performance-based classrooms do
little to bridge the science gender gap; girls and boys experience
science differently.

Researchers Jasna Jovanovic and Sally Steinbach King of the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign chose to study six exemplary
science instructors who had expressed in interviews a sensitivity to
gender differences in their classrooms. The teachers, scattered across
Illinois, taught grades 5 through 8. Teams of researchers visited their
classrooms twice a month over the course of a school year and observed
students-girls and boys-working together in small groups on hands-on
science activities.

The researchers found that the more a student manipulated the
science equipment, the better his or her attitudes toward the subject
by the end of the year. Girls and boys were equally likely to play a
leading role in the activity by instructing a classmate on what to do
or by explaining a science concept to another student. But boys tended
to have their hands on the equipment more often, relegating the girls
to reading directions or making suggestions. The differing behaviors
had no apparent adverse impact on achievement-boys and girls earned
similar grades in all six classrooms. But what surprised the
researchers was that girls' perceptions of their science abilities
actually decreased over the course of the year. That was not the case
with the boys.

Researchers could not say for sure why the girls lost confidence or
why they seemed to take a back seat to the boys. But one point was
clear to them: "The present findings suggest that the performance-based
science classroom did not ensure equal participation for boys and
girls," they write. And that was in classrooms with teachers sensitive
to gender differences in learning. In classrooms where teachers are
less sensitive to these issues, girls may have even fewer opportunities
to play an active role in hands-on learning. The study appeared in the
fall issue of American Educational Research Journal.

Nature Or Nurture: The question won't be resolved by looking
at the results of an 18-year study of mothers and their children
conducted by researchers from the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. The study found that violent behavior is not necessarily
passed down from generation to generation. Academic performance,
however, is another matter.

Researchers have been tracking 57 pairs of teenage mothers and their
sons or daughters since the early 1980s. They found that the children
of mothers who themselves were violent in childhood were only slightly
more aggressive or violent than other children in the study.

On the other hand, mothers who had poor grades in school as children
tended to have children who struggled academically, too. In both cases,
though, the better determinants of how a child turned out were parents'
child-rearing practices and the home environment-not genes, the
researchers said. Mothers who fared poorly in school, for example, also
tended to read to their children less often and to provide them with
fewer books.

"We've got to get away from this idea of the inevitability of poor
outcomes," says Robert Cairns, lead author of the study and director of
the university's Center for Developmental Science. His report appeared
in the December issue of Developmental Psychology.

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